[admin_only] Improvements

1) Stadium construction can now be cancelled. The amount of money you’ll receive back is proportional to how long the construction would take to be finished.

2) We’ve decided that wage caps should be per team, not per player. It makes more sense when you think of it, as each team has its particular financial situation. Everybody should be aware that this value can be way too high, so be very careful when giving high wages.

Added the board screen. It will be empty until next season’s start, afterwards it will contain the board expectations for each competition your team will be playing during the season. These expectations may be a little unrealistic in some cases, for better or worse, but we will try to improve that later on. This screen will contain more information and features in the future.

New source of income: sponsorship. The amount of money received from sponsors every 3 turns is defined based on the team’s recent performance. As the performance history started being recorded when the manager ranking was added it is not complete yet, which means that the sponsor value will be lower than it should for now, specially on MediumTicker. The stadium size will limit the amount of money received from sponsors, but it will probably only affect teams with a great performance.

Added multi-position players (DM, DA, MD, MA, AD, AM). When position penalty starts at the end of next season, this kind of player will receive no penalties if playing in any of his 2 positions. Some of the existing players have received an extra position based on their attributes. Newly generated players have a 25% chance of being able to play in two positions instead of one.

Players now can have two sides (LC, RC or LR), meaning they can play without penalties in any position a player from each side would play. For example, a LC player can play in the left, center-left, center and center-right without penalties, but would receive the maximum penalty if playing in the right side.

No changes were made to existing players. New players have a 30% chance of having 2 sides.

Managers can make transfer offers with a transfer price different than the specified. The selling manager will then be notified that a lower proposal exists. The proposals value will be public and displayed for everybody in the player info page or in the negotiation details. Lower proposals won’t be accepted unless the selling manager reduces the transfer price accordingly. All proposals whose value is greater or equal the transfer price will negotiate with the player, there will be no privileges for higher proposals. When the transfer price is changed (raised or reduced) all managers with offers are notified.

Players, managers and teams can now be added to your hotlists. This works like bookmarks and help you keeping an eye on players and teams of interest, managers who are your friends or rivals in the game and so on. To add a player, manager or team in your hotlists just go to the correspondent info page and use the new “Add to hotlist” icon beside the player/manager/team name. The icon will then be changed to the “Remove from hotlist” icon. To view your hotlist use the new “Hotlists” option in the menu, right below “The Board” option.

You can access the last match replay from your team info screen using the new replay button to the right of the match. This way you can wath the replay without previsously knowing the result (if you have the show recent result option turned off in your settings).

During the match players will move on their own line instead of always moving along the center of the field. The only exception is when they’re close to the opponent goal, when they’ll start to move towards the goal.

From now on matches played will have a man of the match whose name will be in bold in the match report. The man of the match is selected based on the player rating. If more than one player have the highest rating we have some extra points given in the match logic that can be used to decide the one with the best performance. This information is also available in the player history.

As promised, I have changed a lot of things related to our formation screen (mainly around drag and drop). My focus was to improve our internet explorer user experience, but I hope everybody can get a good performance gain. I would appreciate some feedback on that. There are still some points I want to at least improve (tooltip position, line breaks on player names, etc). And I still have lots of plans to some features adds/changes in this area.

Today RubySoccer suffered a big structure migration. This should (hopefully) considerably improve our overall performance. In the beginning we can experience a few bugs, but they will all be fixed as usual. Please help us with feedback.

Donations public/private detailed information are now available. You can see your private info info by clicking on your username here in the forum. Sorry for the style, I hope you all understand why I did not want to waste too much time on this right now.

You can now see the teams ranking (using the same “flag” icon in the menu). If you had managed only one team since we began all this ranking stuff your team will be in the same position as you. In the future we’ll use this ranking to define cup matches.

International competition matches have been rescheduled to happen 6 turns earlier. This will make them end on turn 137, giving room for a Club World Cup match on turn 143 between the Champions League winner and the Libertadores winner. This is not implemented yet but should be added soon.

Any friendly matches scheduled for the turns when the international matches will now take place have been cancelled.

Get ready for Club World Cup! Starting this season the winners of Champions League and Libertadores will play against each other to decide who is the best team in the world. There is currently no prize for the winner, but the ticket income on this Club World Cup match will be $2.000.000 for each team.

It is now possible to choose your default formation. I’ve started a design change on our formation screen – the main objective was to open some space to the new stuff that will arrive. The incomplete version is online so you guys can suggest changes or just tell us your opinion.

Watch your performance! If you go to The Board screen you’ll see a new section was added: Your Peformance. The sentence in this section will give you an ideia of what The Board thinks about your job. You’ll receive messages for extremely good or extremely bad results, in the Board’s opinion. Keep getting too many bad results (even if they don’t explicitly send you bad result messages) and you’ll receive a final warning. After that you’d better start getting better results or you’ll be fired. Be aware that some Boards are more demanding than others.

We expect the game to become more dynamic with this new feature. Also you can now have some hope that you may be able to get your favorite team if their manager is fired for not doing so well. New related features will be added in the future regarding job applications and maybe even invitations to manage a team.

Player transfers are now allowed between users that use or have used in the past the same computer or network to access RubySoccer. There is a value restriction though to prevent cheating trades of overpriced players. This is an experimental change due to the large number of fair users who cannot trade with friends and the small number of teams we currently have, if this prove to be a bad decision for the game we can always go back to the way things worked before.

Our previous player history is now called player statistics. Player history now refers to information regarding transfers involving that player. For now we only cover transfers made from team to team and from free transfers to team. I will add code to cover the player birth later this week.

A new global country ranking is now available. The continental rankings will be used to decide how many spots each country will have in the international competitions while the global ranking will be used to slowly change youth players quality. In order to create this global ranking the international score teams receive for wins and draws has been changed in a tentative to balance both continents. On MediumTicker the scores will be kept the same until next season as international competition have already started.

We have two goals with this global ranking:

1) Try to give an overview of your country performance worldwide;
2) Reduce the difference between youth players around the world (the base value for the skills were between 80 and 75, now they will be slowly increased to be between 80 and 77)

This is our first approach to global ranking. I’m pretty sure there are lots of other ways to do that and we’ll be happy to hear your suggestions to improve this in the future.